Ahh yes... the venerable C64. I too had one of these, but I got mine in the mid 90's. It was a beat up, burnt out, pile of garbage that a neighbor found in a trash pile. Seriously. The monitor was shot, the picture tube was cracked. The collection of parts had a UHF/VHF video card and adapter though. So I used an old TV. I had to rebuild the dual 5.4 floppy drives, but I got them to work. I had a 2.5 megabyte hard drive, but it would erase all data the moment you turned the system off. I had a couple of thermal color printers and an old Okidata black and white printer that used the same ink spools as a typewriter.

I collected, wrote and coded a massive amount of software for that system. My mom would go into my room while I was at school and turn the thing off --erasing and destroying HOURS and HOURS of programming work. Ugh.